milos topic » Web

Export and import saved passwords from Firefox

Milos Topic — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:56:13 +0000

While certainly not one of better security practices we are all guilty of saving passwords in Firefox (and other browsers of choice) for frequently visited websites. If you visit a particular site daily it is much more convenient to allow your web browser to save your user name and password for later use. This is fine as long as you use a master password and understand potential issues should you lose your computer or should its security be compromised in any way.

However, let me get back to the topic of this post, exporting and importing saved passwords from Firefox. This is a task you might want to do for several reasons such as moving your files to a new computer or reinstalling the operating system on your existing machine. Whatever the reason might be one of the easiest ways to export/import your passwords from/to Firefox is an add-on appropriately named, Password Exporter.

Password Exporter add-on for Firefox will export all saved passwords into an XML file and allow you to import the same at a later time. Once you have installed this add-on and restarted Firefox you will then be able to export/import your passwords by going to Tools –> Options… –> Security –> Import/Export Passwords.

IMPORTANT
If you allow a web browser to save passwords make sure you use a master password. Also, even more important, don’t save login credentials for financial institutions. Most banks don’t allow for this anyway since they don’t provide a login cookie, but if your bank does, opt against saving it.

Post from: Milos Topic

Export and import saved passwords from Firefox

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Facebook’s new privacy settings

Milos Topic — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:56:25 +0000

Facebook is finally catching up to some of their perpetual security concerns and is strengthening their privacy policy and therefor the settings as well. It took a while but as of this morning (when I noticed the change) privacy settings have been tightened a bit and are finally working as expected. It will take some time for majority of folks to review their current settings and tweak their profiles as desired, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Considering the size of their social network (350 million) and ever growing popularity worldwide it is important to seriously evaluate all aspects of security from profiles to servers, routers, including physical access at their company.
In today’s world you can never spend too much attention on security.

Post from: Milos Topic

Facebook’s new privacy settings

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Designing a client friendly website

Milos Topic — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:30:17 +0000

We have all came across websites with a mass of links and never ending scroll bars of text which have frequently left us frustrated and annoyed. Being able to quickly find what you are looking for is important and websites with a clear structure who have also been properly indexed (site specific search) are a joy to visit. Unorganized sites with hidden information often cause us to give up and move on to another site, often that of a competitor.

While it is important to provide relevant and valuable information it is important not to overdo it and overwhelm your potential clients. Besides pages explaining your business and your competencies, product or service you provide you obviously need a contact page, a pricing model; maybe an option for customers to purchase your product directly on your site and that should be all for most businesses. Others could benefit from a blog or links to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Generally that should suffice for an overwhelming majority of business. There is no need to overload your site with pages about things your bill paying customers won’t care about. Remember, time is money and both your and your clients’ time is very valuable.

Items of importance:

get to the point
- limit scrolling
- curb your link count
explain
- who you are
- what you do
provide
- contact info
- pricing and order info
expand
- blog
- social networking sites
design, easy on the eyes
Post from: Milos Topic

Designing a client friendly website
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Keep your websites secure

Milos Topic — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:31:57 +0000

I‘m on a search for a few replacement windows and have been looking all over north New Jersey for a place that can provide them in less than the standard 2-6 weeks time frame. One of the places recommended to me was “Air-Chek Window Depot” in Clifton, NJ.

First thing I did is went online to see if they had a website and to get their address and contact info. They were the first hit on Google and while they had the info I was looking for I remember thinking that they should probably have a better, more modern website with less clutter and pages of plain text. I went there and they said that they would take two weeks as well so I kept looking. Now, two days later and unsuccessful in locating a place that has the sizes I need in less than two weeks I decided to go back to them and place the order but I forgot their hours so I went back online only to see that they were hacked.

They seemed like nice people and I feel bad for them, but hopefully they have someone who will be able to recover their online presence soon. Unfortunately, this is another example of why it is important to keep your website secure, up to date, backed up and monitored regularly. This can happen to anyone so don’t take your online security for granted.

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Keep your websites secure

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Is Blackboard the best CMS out there?

Milos Topic — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:11:08 +0000

Our institution has been using Blackboard (Bb) for a while now as their Course Management System (CMS) of choice with mixed results. Depending who you ask, based on their technical knowledge and their experience using Blackboard (and other CMS solutions) you will get different responses. They range from it is good, does what I need it to do to can we please use anything but Blackboard. Both performance and availability have been known to be a bit spotty and we all know that those two parameters are very important to students and faculty.

My usage has been fairly limited since I don’t teach any courses and my needs are different from those of a faculty (or even some other staff members). This is why I’m probably not the best person to provide an in-depth assessment of Bb v.7.3 (currently in production) and why I turn to those who have more exposure to Blackboard and other CMS tools such as Moodle, Sakai and the likes to hear what your thoughts are.

Is Bb the best or simply the largest solution out there? What are you running/using at your school/work and how satisfied are you with that product?

Post from: Milos Topic

Is Blackboard the best CMS out there?

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Make your Outlook better with Xobni

Milos Topic — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:04:53 +0000

For a while now my team and I have been using Xobni, an Outlook plugin that improves e-mail client’s search for both messages and contact information. It also goes a step further by aggregating and correlating data between different social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Xobni also provides data from Hoovers on companies your contacts work for and a number of very useful statistics when it comes to your contacts’ usage of e-mail and sending/responding patterns. It also keeps track of e-mails (and attachments) exchanged between you and all of your contacts in easy to follow threaded conversations.

Due to features mentioned above I find it to be a valuable, fast and easy tool to use. Also, did I mention that it is FREE. Yes, there is a paid version (Xobni Plus) which also includes calendar data search among other features, but the free version is already a massive step in the right direction when it comes to organizing your e-mails, contacts and more.

If you are an avid Outlook user you will definitely appreciate this plugin. Go and get it now then let me know which feature has the greatest impact on your daily computing productivity.

Post from: Milos Topic

Make your Outlook better with Xobni

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Anti-Virus software

Milos Topic — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:28:23 +0000

In today’s world where network and system security is of great importance and we live and operate behind firewalls, VPNs, SSH, encryption, anti-virus software and many other tools that help make us more secure, it is often difficult figuring out that winning combo to stay safe online and protect your personal information.

One component that in a sense started it all, but is now often overlooked (especially by non-Windows users thinking that viruses and malware don’t apply to them) are Anti-Virus products. Today, they go beyond simple signature scanning and early days of amateur heuristics behavior; most of them also include HIPS (host-based intrusion prevention system) and can even blacklist/white list applications, files and directories. Having said that and considering that many of the above mentioned technologies work on protecting your data while it travels from and to your computer it is still important to have a good local solution for when unwelcome code enters your file system. Over the past several years I have tested numerous AV products and while they performed most functions as advertised I didn’t find any of them to be impressive (Kaspersky being the exception in this case). They are either memory/processor hogs; too slow in updating they definitions or cause more problems then solutions they provide (anyone remember few years back Norton locking down your system and outbound ports if something wasn’t to its liking?).

Here’s where my question comes in. As I look to test new products for both internal use and to recommend to clients I want to make sure we use the best solution currently available. Based on your knowledge and experience even if it is derived from simple observations of what was installed by your IT department what anti-virus software keeps your data secure? Ideally, I’m looking for a solution that works equally well on Windows and OS X based systems. Furthermore, if it worked on popular Linux distros (Ubuntu, SUSE to name a couple) as well I would be grateful.

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Anti-Virus software

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Firefox 3.5.x has been a disaster so far

Milos Topic — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:51:19 +0000

Love Firefox, but not a fan of their latest version. It’s been crashing left and right, slow, unresponsive, buggy and to be honest more than a bit annoying.

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Firefox 3.5.x has been a disaster so far

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It’s quiet out there

Milos Topic — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:03:01 +0000

On this morning of social networks outages where Facebook is iffy and Twitter is down it’s nice to enjoy a cup of coffee in “peace”

By the way, I wonder if they both run on the same hardware or are in the process of merging?

Update: As a was going through my RSS feeds I came across info on several blogs that Twitter is actually experiencing a denial-of-service attack. They should talk to Microsoft’s engineers and system admins, they have enormous experience on defending against these and are actually very good at it.

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It’s quiet out there

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App Store approval process, is there one?

Milos Topic — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:23:20 +0000

How do App Store apps get approved and by whom? Is there a formalized process or are they left to someone’s discretion? Will FCC help us get a better understanding of how this somewhat “mysterious” and confusing process works?

These are just some of the questions I would like to have answered as I would like to use some of the apps they (Apple and/or AT&T) rejected or limited so far like Google Voice and SlingBox.

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App Store approval process, is there one?

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